Just One Day jod-1

by Gayle Forman

  She eyes it suspiciously, then takes it, pinching it between her fingers as though it were contagious. She gingerly lays it on a stack of CD cases.

  “So, what happened?” I ask. “He came back here all banged up?”

  She nods, barely.

  “Why?”

  She frowns. “He would not say.”

  Silence. She looks down, then quickly glances at me. “He looked through your suitcase.”

  What was in there? A packing list. Clothes. Souvenirs. Unwritten postcards. My luggage tag? No, that snapped off in the Tube station back in London. My diary? Which I now have. I grab it out of my bag, leaf through a few entries. There’s something about Rome and feral cats. Vienna and the Schönbrunn Palace. The opera in Prague. But there is nothing, nothing of me. Not my name. My address. My email address. Not the addresses of any of the people I met on the tour. We didn’t even bother with the pretense of keeping in touch. I shove the diary back in my bag. Céline is peering through narrowed eyes, watching while pretending not to.

  “Did he take anything from my bag? Find anything?”

  “No. He only smelled. . . .” She stops, as if in pain.

  “He smelled what?”

  “He smelled terrible,” she says solemnly. “He took your watch. I told him to leave it. My uncle is a jeweler, so I know it was expensive. But he refused.”

  I sigh. “Where can I find him, Céline? Please. You can help me with that much.”

  “That much? I help you with so much already,” she says, all huffy with her own indignation. “And I don’t know where to find him. I don’t lie.” She looks hard at me. “I tell you the truth, and that is that Willem is the kind of man who comes when he comes. And mostly, he doesn’t.”

  I wish I could tell her that she’s wrong. That with us, it was different. But if he didn’t stay in love with Céline, what makes me think that after one day, even if he did like me, I haven’t been completely licked clean?

  “So you did not have any luck? On the Internet?” she asks.

  I start to gather my things. “No.”

  “Willem de Ruiter is a common name, n’est-ce pas?” she says. Then she does something I wouldn’t have thought her capable of. She blushes. And that is how I know she’s looked for him too. And she didn’t find him, either. And all at once, I wonder if I haven’t gotten Céline, if not altogether wrong, then a little bit wrong.

  I take one of my extra Paris postcards. I write my name, address, all my details on it, and hand it to her. “If you see Willem. Or if you’re ever in Boston and need a place to crash—or store your stuff.”

  She takes the postcard and looks at it. Then she shoves it in a drawer. “Boss-tone. I think I prefer New York,” she sniffs. I’m almost relieved that she’s sounding like her haughty self again.

  I think of Dee. He could handle Céline. “That can probably be arranged.”

  When I get to the door, Céline calls out my name. I turn around. I see that she’s taken a bite of the macaron, the round cookie now a half moon.

  “I am sorry I called you a coward,” she says.

  “That’s okay,” I say. “I am sometimes. But I’m trying to be braver.”

  “Bon.” She pauses, and if I didn’t know better, I’d think she maybe almost was considering a smile. “If you find Willem again, you will need to be brave.”

  _ _ _

  I go sit down on the edge of a fountain to consider what Céline said. I can’t quite make out if it was meant in support or warning, or maybe both. But it all seems academic, anyhow, because I’ve reached a dead end. She doesn’t know where he is. I can try some more Internet searching and send another letter to Guerrilla Will, but other than that, I’m tapped.

  You will need to be brave.

  Maybe it’s all for the best. Maybe I end here. Tomorrow I will go to Versailles with the Oz crew. And that feels okay. I pull out the map Dee and Sandra gave me to plot my route back to the hostel. It’s not too far. I can walk. I trace the route with my finger. When I do, my finger runs over not one but two big pink squares. The big pink squares on this map are hospitals. I pull the map closer to my face. There are pink squares all over the place. Paris is crazy with hospitals. I run my finger to the art squat. There are several hospitals within a thumb’s width of the squat too.

  If Willem got hurt near the art squat, and he got stitches, there’s a good chance it happened at one of these hospitals. “Thank you, Dee!” I call out into the Paris afternoon. “And thank you, Céline,” I add a bit more quietly. And then I get up and go.

  _ _ _

  The next day, Kelly greets me coolly, which I can tell is hard work for her. I apologize for going MIA yesterday.

  “S’okay,” she says, “but you’re coming with us today to Versailles?”

  I grimace. “I can’t.”

  Her face hardens into hurt. “If you don’t want to hang with us, it’s fine, but don’t make plans to spare our feelings.”

  I’m not sure why I haven’t told her. It feels sort of silly, being over here, going to all this trouble, for a guy I knew for a day. But as I tell Kelly a short version of the long story, including today’s mad quest, her face grows serious. When I’m done, she just gives a little nod of her head. “I understand,” she says solemnly. “I’ll see you down at brekkie.”

  When I get down to the breakfast room, Kelly and the group are huddled around one of the big wooden tables, maps spread out in front of them. I take my croissant and tea and yogurt and join them.

  “We’re coming with you,” she declares. “All of us.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because you need an army for this.” The rest of the group sloppy salute me, and then they all start talking at once. Very loudly. People look over at us, but these guys are irrepressible. Only the pale petite girl at the edge of our table ignores us, keeping her nose in a book.

  “Are you sure you guys want to miss Versailles?”

  “Versailles is a relic,” Kelly insists. “It’s not going anywhere. But this is real life. Real romance. What could be more French than that?”

  “We’re coming with you, like it or not. If we have to follow you to every French hospital between here and Nice,” Shazzer says.

  “I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” I say “I’ve looked on the map. I’ve narrowed it down to three likely hospitals.”

  The elfin girl looks up. Her eyes are so pale they seem to be made of water. “I’m sorry, but did you say you were going to a hospital?” she asks.

  I look at the Australians, my ragtag army, all of them gung ho. “Apparently so.”

  The elfin girl looks at me with a weird intensity. “I know hospitals,” she says in a quiet voice.

  I look back at her. Really, I can’t think of anything more boring than this, except maybe a visit to a French unemployment office. I can’t imagine that she would want to come along. Except maybe she’s lonely. And that I understand.

  “Do you, do you want to go with us?” I ask.

  “Not particularly,” she says. “But I think I should.”

  The first hospital on the map turns out to some sort of private hospital, where, after an hour of being sent from one office to the next, we find out that, while there is an emergency room, it does not take most cases off the street, but rather sends them to the public hospitals. They send us to Hôpital Lariboisière. We head straight for the urgences, the French version of the emergency room, and after being given a number and told to wait, we sit for ages in uncomfortable chairs, along with all the people with broken elbows and coughs that sound really ugly and contagious.

  The initial enthusiasm of the group starts to flag when they realize that going to an emergency room is as boring in France as it is anywhere else. They are reduced to entertaining themselves with spitballs and card games of War, which does not endear the nurses to them. Wren, the strange, pale, pixie girl we’ve picked up, participates in none of the silliness. She just keeps reading her book.

  B
y the time we are called to the front counter, the nurses are hating us, and the feeling is pretty much mutual. Shazzer, who apparently speaks the best French, is anointed ambassador, and I don’t know if it’s her French skills or her diplomatic ones that are lacking, but within five minutes, she is heatedly arguing with the nurse, and within ten, we are being escorted to the street.

  It’s now three o’clock. The day is half gone, and I can see the group is antsy, tired, hungry, wishing that they’d gone to Versailles. And now that I think about it, I realize how ridiculous this is. The front desk at my father’s practice is manned by a nurse named Leona, who won’t let even me go back into the office unless my father is in there and waiting for me. Leona would never give out a record to me—her boss’s daughter, who speaks the same language as she does—let alone a foreign stranger.

  “That was a bust,” I tell them when we come out onto the pavement. The cloud layer that has been sitting over Paris for the last few days has burned off while we were waiting inside, and the day has turned hot and clear. “At least you can salvage the rest of the afternoon. Get some food and have a picnic in the Luxembourg Gardens.”

  I can see the idea is tempting. No one rebuffs it. “But we promised we’d be your wingmen,” Kelly says. “We can’t let you do this alone.”

  I hold up my hands in surrender. “You’re not. I’m done. This is a lost cause.”

  Maps are taken out. Metro routes are debated. Picnic items are discussed.

  “People mix up their patron saints, you know?” I look up. Wren, our pixie tagalong, who has been all but silent all day, has finally spoken.

  “They do?”

  She nods. “Saint Anthony is the patron saint of lost things. But Saint Jude is the patron saint of lost causes. You have to make sure you ask the right saint for help.”

  There’s a moment as everyone looks at Wren. Is she some kind of religious nut?

  “Who would be in charge of a lost person?” I ask.

  Wren stops to consider. “That would depend. What kind of lost?”

  I don’t know. I don’t know if he’s lost at all. Maybe he’s exactly where he wants to be. Maybe I’m the lost one, chasing someone who has no desire to be found. “I’m not sure.”

  Wren twirls her bracelet, fingering the charms. “Perhaps you should just pray to both.” She shows me the little charms with each patron saint. There are many more charms, one with a date, another with a clover, one with a bird.

  “But I’m Jewish.”

  “Oh, they don’t care.” Wren looks up at me. Her eyes don’t seem blue so much as the absence of blue. Like the sky just before dawn. “You should ask the saints for help. And you should go to that third hospital.”

  _ _ _

  Hôpital Saint-Louis turns out to be a four-hundred-year-old hospital. Wren and I make our way into the modern wing that sits adjacent. I’ve sent the others on to Luxembourg Gardens without much of an argument. Sunlight filters in through the glass atrium, throwing prisms of light onto the floor.

  It’s quiet in the ER, only a few people sitting among rows of empty chairs. Wren goes right up to the two male nurses behind the desk and that weirdly mellifluous voice of hers breaks out in perfect French. I stand behind her, catching enough of what she says to get that she is telling my story, mesmerizing them with it. Even the people in the chairs are leaning in to hear her quiet voice. I have no idea how Wren even knows the story; I didn’t tell her. Maybe she picked it up at breakfast or among the others. She finishes, and there is silence. The nurses stare at her, then look down and start typing.

  “How do you speak French so well?” I whisper.

  “I’m from Quebec.”

  “Why didn’t you translate at the other hospital?”

  “Because it wasn’t the right one.”

  The nurses ask me his name. I say it. I spell it. I hear the tap of the computer keys as they input it.

  “Non,” one nurse says. “Pas ici.” He shakes his head.

  “Attendez,” the other says. Wait.

  He types some more. He says a bunch of things to Wren, and I lose track, but then one phrase floats to the top: a date. The day after the day Willem and I spent together. The day we got separated.

  My breath stops. He looks up, repeats the date to me.

  “Yes,” I say. That would’ve been when he was here. “Oui.”

  The nurse says something and something else I don’t understand. I turn to Wren. “Can they tell us how to find him?”

  Wren asks a questions, then translates back. “The records are sealed.”

  “But they don’t have to give us anything written. They must have something on him.”

  “They say it’s all in the billing department now. They don’t keep much here.”

  “There has to be something. Now’s the time to ask Saint Jude for help.”

  Wren fingers the charm on her bracelet. A pair of doctors in scrubs and lab coats come through the double doors, coffee cups in hand. Wren and I look at each other, Saint Jude apparently deciding to bestow twin inspiration.

  “Can I speak to a doctor?” I ask the nurses in my horrible French. “Maybe the . . .” I turn to Wren. “How do you say ‘attending physician’ in French? Or the doctor who treated Willem?”

  The nurse must understand some English because he rubs his chin and goes back to the computer. “Ahh, Dr. Robinet,” he says, and picks up a phone. A few minutes later, a pair of double doors swing open, and it’s like this time Saint Jude decided to send us a bonus, because the doctor is TV-handsome: curly salt-and-pepper hair, a face that’s both delicate and rugged. Wren starts to explain the situation, but then I realize that, lost cause or not, I have to make my own case. In the most labored French imaginable, I attempt to explain: Friend hurt. At this hospital. Lost friend. Need to find. I’m frazzled, and with my bare-basics phrases, I must sound like a cavewoman.

  Dr. Robinet looks at me for a while. Then he beckons for us to follow him through the double doors into an empty examination room, where he gestures for us to sit on the table while he settles on a rolling stool.

  “I understand your dilemma,” he replies in perfect British-accented English. “But we can’t just give out files about a patient.” He turns to look directly at me. His eyes are bright green, both sharp and kind. “I understand you’ve come all the way from America, but I am sorry.”

  “Can you at least tell me what happened to him? Without actually looking into his chart? Would that be breaking protocol?”

  Dr. Robinet smiles patiently. “I see dozens of patients a day. And this was, you say, a year ago?”

  I nod. “Yes.” I bury my head in my hands. The folly of it hits me anew. One day. One year.

  “Perhaps if you described him.” Dr. Robinet feeds me some rope.

  I snatch it up. “He was Dutch. Very tall, six foot three—it’s one point nine in metric. Seventy-five kilos. He had very light hair, almost like straw, but very dark eyes, almost like coals. He was skinny. His fingers were long. He had a scar, like a zigzag, right on the top of his foot.” As I continue to describe him, details I thought I’d forgotten come back to me, and an image of him emerges.

  But Dr. Robinet can’t see it. He looks puzzled, and I realize that from his point of view, I’ve described a tall blond guy, one person among thousands.

  “Perhaps if you had a photograph?”

  I feel as if the image I’ve created of Willem is alive in the room. He’d been right about not needing a camera to record the important things. He’d been there inside me all this time.

  “I don’t,” I say. “Oh, but he had stitches. And a black eye.”

  “That describes a majority of the people we treat,” Dr. Robinet says. “I am very sorry.” He stands up off the stool; something clinks to the ground. Wren retrieves a euro coin off the floor and starts to hand it back to him.

  “Wait! He did this thing with coins,” I say. “He could balance a coin along his knuckles. Like this. May I?” I reach ou
t for the euro and show how he flipped a coin across his knuckles.

  I hand Dr. Robinet back his euro, and he holds it in his hand, examining it as if it were a rare coin. Then he flips it up in the air and catches it. “Commotion cérébrale!” he says.

  “What?”

  “Concussion!” Wren translates.

  “Concussion?”

  He holds up his index finger and turns it around slowly, like he’s spooling information from a deep well. “He had a concussion. And if I recall, a facial laceration. We wanted him to stay for observation—concussions can be serious—and we wanted to report it to the police because he’d been assaulted.”

  “Assaulted? Why? By whom?”

  “We don’t know. It is customary to file a police report, but he refused. He was very agitated. I remember now! He wouldn’t stay beyond a few hours. He wanted to leave straight away, but we insisted he stay for a CT scan. But as soon as we stitched him up and saw there was no cerebral bleeding, he insisted he had to go. He said it was very important. Someone he was going to lose.” He turns to me, his eyes huge now. “You?”

  “You,” Wren says.

  “Me,” I say. Black spots dance in my vision, and my head feels liquid.

  “I think she’s going to faint,” Wren says.

  “Put your head between your legs,” Dr. Robinet advises. He calls out into the hall, and a nurse brings me a glass of water. I drink it. The world stops spinning. Slowly, I sit back up. Dr. Robinet is looking at me now, and it’s like the shade of professionalism has dropped.

  “But this was a year ago,” he asks in a blanket-soft voice. “You lost each other a year ago?”

  I nod.

  “And you’ve been looking all this time?”

  I nod again. In some way, I have.

  “And do you think he’s been looking for you?”

  “I don’t know.” And I don’t. Just because he tried to find me a year ago doesn’t me he wants to find me now. Or wants me to find him.

  “But you must know,” he replies. And for a minute I think he’s reprimanding me that I ought to know, but then he picks up the phone and makes a call. When he’s done, he turns to me. “You must know,” he repeats. “Go to window two in the billing office now. They cannot release his chart, but I have instructed them to release his address.”